Re-Logic's 2D sandbox hit Terraria is heading to 3DS and Wii U in Q1 2016, publisher 505 Games has announced.

Both versions will feature touchscreen controls with online and offline multiplayer. The Wii U version will support up to eight-player multiplayer with four-player split-screen available. The 3DS version, however, is capped at four players total.

Oft likened to a 2D Minecraft, Terraria originally launched on PC in 2011 before being ported to Xbox 360, PS3, Vita, iOS and Android in 2013. It then arrived on PS4 and Xbox One last November.

Ubisoft has detailed some of the changes it's made to Zombi, its recently announced rendition of ZombiU for PS4, Xbox One and PC.

As detailed on the Ubiblog, one of the most notably differences is that there will be more melee weapons. While ZombiU limited players to a cricket bat, Zombi will feature two additional short-range implements: a shovel and a nail bat. The former has a longer range and can hit multiple foes in a single swing. The latter can also do that, plus it deals additional damage and increases your chances of a critical hit.

The flashlight will also be altered as it will now feature the option to switch to a further-reaching beam at the expense of battery life. It will also take a full 30 seconds to recharge should it run out of juice.

Version 1.1.0 adds the two new features for free. Tournaments let you compete online with scores of other players, while the in-built YouTube upload lets you save replays to the streaming video site and Miiverse simultaneously.

Support for another wave of paid-for DLC has also been added, although you'll need to purchase all of it separately.

Yooka-Laylee, Playtonic Games' spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie, now has a publisher with Worms developer Team17.

That may strike some as odd since Yooka-Laylee raised over £2.09m on Kickstarter last month, but the developer explained that Team17 won't be providing any funding. Instead, it will handle the more tedious administrative affairs that come with publishing a multiplatform game.

"From the very start we said that we'd welcome only a partner that could genuinely improve the creation of our game, while respecting the independence and creative autonomy of our development team," explained Playtonic creative lead Gavin Price.

Nintendo has posted an encouraging profit (8.3bn yen / £43m) for the months April, May and June. Last year it was in the red (-9.9bn yen / -£51m).

The good news is 3DS sales (1m for the quarter), Splatoon sales and amiibo sales. Splatoon has sold 1.62m units since its release at the end of May, helping the Wii U edge over the 10m sales milestone (10.01m specifically) after two-and-a-half years on sale. Considering Splatoon is Wii U exclusive, and it was on sale for two full months, that's a convincing result for the new IP. Then again, Mario Kart 8 is owned by 5.11 million people - more than half of the Wii U audience.

Amiibo sales weren't specified but referred to as "favourable" and, Nintendo promised, "we will continue to expand the lineup". And with an expanded lineup comes potential for plenty more defective models, which have become collector's items and sell for a fortune. Someone has dedicated a Tumblr page to them. "At the same time," the report added, "we aim to stimulate demand for amiibo from owners of the original Nintendo 3DS hardware systems by releasing the Nintendo 3DS NFC Reader/Writer accessory (for Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo 3DS XL and Nintendo 2DS), which will be launched simultaneously with Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer [out in Europe 2nd October 2015]."

It is fascinating to think about the numbers that developers choose to work with, and 100 - a plain old century - is the most intriguing number that has come my way in quite a while. The Swindle gives you 100 days to prepare for its final mission, and while that's enough time to allow you to work around unforeseen accidents, it's also enough time to ensure that failure will really sting. On my first attempt, those 100 days of build-up culminated in a mission that lasted 12 seconds start to finish, and ended, as all unsuccessful missions do, with a blizzard of banknotes and the crumpled thunk of a sodden body impacting on the cobblestones.

The Swindle's a knockabout 2D platformer at heart: a Spelunky-flavoured, steampunky muddle of stealth and violence in which you rob a series of procedurally scrambled mansions. Who doesn't like a good caper? But when this game swipes at you with its claws, it can draw blood, and that 100-day time limit is the reason. You will really love this, or you will really hate it, I suspect. I really love it.

We're in Alternate Victorian London here, surrounded by clanking robots and rattling blimps. The world is viewed through a thick smudge of dirt and smoke, and technology, by and large, tends to look like it might be an early form of Teasmaid. In 100 days, Scotland Yard will turn on The Devil's Basilisk, a mass surveillance system that will basically end all crime for good. Cast as a criminal - or rather a whole motley of them - you have a certain vested interest in this not happening, so you hatch a plan to swipe the bobbies' nasty machine before it's been activated. Kitting out for that final mission is going to cost you money, though, which means 100 days of increasingly risky robberies as you spend your way through the necessary upgrade trees. Voila: a pleasant sense of escalation and a comment on government surveillance. Its mere existence fundamentally alters the behaviour of the population it is spying on - and not in a good way.

Splatoon's big August update will raise the level cap all the way to 50, introducing a handful of new modes in the progress while making it easier for players to battle together.

The level cap, which previously sat at 20, is also being risen in ranked battles, with S and S+ rankings now available. The update also introduces Squad Battles, in which players can partner up with friends before playing Ranked Battles together as a team, and Private Battles, which allows players to set up their own lobbies where can invite others to partake in their choice of mode. Here, players can also even - or distort - the odds, setting up 1v2, 1v4 or any other combination of players in the 8-player multiplayer.

Two new weapon types are also being introduced, with Sloshers and Splatlings making their debut. Alongside all that, 40 all-new pieces of gear are coming to the in-game stores.

If you've always loved Ico for its sparseness - the wind-blasted ruins, the empty space, the near total absence of an overbearing backstory - you probably had mixed emotions about this week's news that fans have datamined the game and discovered that the original script was far longer than the final cut. 115 lines of dialogue for an entire game is hardly chatty, of course, but Ico as we have it now is all about restraint, about the things that go unsaid or unexplained. Will Self has a wonderful word that's worth reappropriating for this kind of thing: under-imagined. It's not a criticism at all in this context (or in his original context), just an acknowledgement that if showing is better than telling, sometimes not showing or telling is better than both.

Ico's not the only game that we're learning more about long after the fact. Far more delightful is a recent story about Fallout 3 that suggests that, in order to create the effect of a player riding a subway train, the player was actually wearing the subway train in question. First-person viewpoints can hide an awful lot of fudging: the only thing that truly matters is what ends up on the screen, after all. We expect this trickery with cinema, where years of Behind-the-Scenes TV shows have meant that we now know that the rocks are polystyrene, the skyline is digital, and that, just out of view, the actors can see a bunch of ladders and lighting rigs and assistant directors drinking Frappuccinos. With games, it's a little different perhaps - more along the lines of the mutated spinal monstrosities that Crytek relied on to get crouch animations right for Crysis 2 - but the hidden world is still there, jury-rigged, Scotch-taped, and endearingly human.

The humanity of this stuff is what I find most fascinating: that hidden in the code you get traces of the people who made the game. It's everywhere in code, I gather: comments explaining how a thing operates, or why a thing operates in a very strange way, tacked inside everything from the stuff that controls cashpoint interfaces to the workings of an old NES cartridge. Normally we never get to see this, and that's fine. Because it means on the rare occasions we do get to see it, it makes all the more impact.

If you're searching for the new generation of talent within Nintendo, you needn't look much further than Tsubasa Sakaguchi. They certainly don't come much more youthful that the co-director of Splatoon, Nintendo EAD's first all-new character led game in 14 years; when we meet in a sushi house in Soho he bristles with a child-like energy and enthusiasm, his long hair tied back and his bright yellow Splatoon-themed t-shirt shining as brightly as his smiling eyes. You can sense so much of that energy in Splatoon too, a game that dances to the rhythm of youthful exuberance. New beginnings don't come much more convincing than this.

Sakaguchi's hardly new to Nintendo, though - his first credit with the company came as a character designer in 2006's Twilight Princess - and he's been well schooled in the way of Nintendo's EAD, learning the lessons of Shigeru Miyamoto. And so while the characters in Splatoon might be new, as are many of the mechanics, the craft is typical of Nintendo. If you want an oversight into the processes behind the creation of Nintendo's games, and the constant iterations that take place before we ever get to play them, there's no better place to look than one of the final Iwata Asks, carried out earlier this year, that goes into the genesis of Splatoon. "The way that Miyamoto and EAD make games, the idea comes not from the design, but from the function," observed Nintendo's late president Satoru Iwata. "The design comes after."

It's that one moment, and that one mechanic that spirals out to make a game, in other words; in Mario it's the joy of movement and momentum, and in Splatoon's case it's the simple, messy pleasure of throwing paint around. From there, it's the detail in design where you'll find much of the game, and Splatoon's eye for detail is as good as anything I've seen come out of Nintendo. Sakaguchi came up with the idea of having squids in the game - at first it was simply blocks of tofu spraying ink at each other, before they slowly evolved into rabbits - and it's that introduction that ties all of Splatoon together with a strange yet consistent logic. It makes for a game that's been hard to categorise.

UPDATE: 17/07/2015 5.15pm: The Zelda anime series Kickstarter has been removed.

According to project lead Michael Patch, Nintendo never sent a cease and desist order, but it was rather backlash from other fans that convinced Patch to pull the plug.

[Editor's note: It appears that the Kickstarter campaign received a copyright strike after all. It came from Miller Nash Graham & Dunn LLP, a firm that's represented Nintendo in the past. This strike and Aeipathy's resignation post both went up on 15th July. We're currently investigating the order in which these went up.]

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1768501Thu, 16 Jul 2015 14:56:00 +0100Devil's Third is a shoddy game - but can it be so bad it's good?

Have you ever pondered over the question of what would happen if Tomonobu Itagaki made a mash-up of Ninja Gaiden and Modern Warfare-era Call of Duty, most likely while drunk and working on a PlayStation 2 devkit with a fiver and a pocketful of loose change to bring it all home? Boy does Devil's Third have the answer for you.

It's been half a decade since Devil's Third was announced, initially as a PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game created by Itagaki's newly-formed Valhalla Game Studios in partnership with the now defunct THQ, and you sense the years haven't been kind. Having passed through different publishers and game engines, the end result lurches close to disaster. I've played a fair few hours of Devil's Third's single-player campaign at this point, and I'm not entirely sure whether this is one of those games that's so bad it's good. I can say with some certainty that it's bad, though.

Devil's Third opens with a prisoner performing a drum solo in Guantanamo Bay, and it spirals downwards from there. This isn't some Kojima-esque examination of the ethics of blacksites - it is, instead, awkward window-dressing for an interminable tale about saving the world. You play as the man spinning those sticks, an angry Russian terrorist named - wait for it - Ivan who's offered a reprieve and then patrols warzones with his nipples bared, the tattoos on his torso glowing like embers as he works through leagues of badmen and, later on, mutants and zombies.

Satoru Iwata, who has passed away at the age of 55, was once seen unboxing a Wii U in a Nintendo video sporting white surgical gloves: the perfect accompaniment to a man who was gentle, self-deprecating, polite and precise. Behind the scenes, however, he was also a man who was never afraid to get his hands dirty. There's a wonderful story about him patrolling the shop floor at Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters prior to the Wii U's release, being shown the line-up for the console's impending launch in his role as the company's president. He paused on Balloon Trip Breeze, a mini-game within Nintendo Land which paid tribute to Balloon Fight, the 1984 game on which Iwata acted as programmer. Noticing something wasn't quite right with the feel of the characters as they flapped their way across the screen, he astonished everyone present as he set about fixing it - the head of the company rolling his sleeves up and getting stuck into the code.

Iwata's tenure, and the affection and respect in which he is held by developers and players alike, has been defined by this hands-on approach. Speaking to Shigesato Itoi, with whom he worked to create the SNES role-playing game Earthbound, Iwata once said he never wanted to be a mere bystander. He never was.

Born during the winter of 1959 in Sapporo, the largest city on Japan's northernmost island Hokkaido, Iwata took an early interest in electronic hardware and games, and was enduringly fascinated by the point at which the two meet. Having his first experience with games via Pong, Iwata bought an early Hewlett Packard pocket calculator and soon put it to novel use. "I think I was one of the original early adopters," he said during his 2005 GDC keynote. "But whereas some used them for mathematics, I used mine to create video games." His first game was an approximation of baseball, played out on the calculator's crude display through numbers alone. His school friends loved it.

UPDATE 11.00am: Nintendo of Europe president Satoru Shibata has released a statement offering his own words of condolence. The full text lies below:

"Nintendo of Europe is today mourning the passing of Mr Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's Global President. It is difficult to put into words the sadness we feel at this time. Mr. Iwata was a strong leader, a unique figure in the gaming industry and an important part of Nintendo's history.

"He was a visionary in every sense of the word and we will miss him dearly. Just as Mr. Iwata challenged us to always push forward, we will ensure his legacy lives on through our ongoing work to always surprise and delight our fans. At this time our thoughts are with his family."

Pokémon developer Game Freak's upcoming platformer Tembo the Badass Elephant is heading to PS4, Xbox One and PC on 21st July, publisher Sega has announced.

It will go for £9.99 / €12.99 / $14.99, though a 10 per cent discount will be available for pre-orders on Steam, or for PS Plus or Xbox Live Gold members who purchase it shortly after launch.

Tembo the Badass Elephant marks Game Freaks' debut on a Microsoft platform and it hasn't made a title for a Sony piece of hardware since the original PlayStation. While known for its Pokémon titles, Game Freak also made the platforming adventure Drill Dozer for the Game Boy Advance. Like Tembo, that title also featured a lot of bashing through stuff.

All of the Doctor Whos are in Warner Bros. Interactive's Lego Dimensions game - but only Peter Capaldi has done voice acting.

Capaldi, who plays the 12th Doctor, Jenna Coleman, who plays Clara Oswald, and Michelle Gomez, who plays Missy, all voice their respective characters from the show.

There's a new trailer, below, that shows Doctor Who gameplay. The TARDIS is in Gotham City and Hill Valley, the Doctor is alongside Homer Simpson in Aperture Science, rides a haunted mine car with Scooby and Shaggy, and fights alongside Kai and Cragger in a Ninjago battle arena. Video games!

Well, technically Peanuts is getting a movie adaptation, and that's what's getting the video game spin-off, but you get the idea.

Dubbed The Peanuts Movie: Snoopy's Grand Adventure, it will be an oldschool platformer by Behaviour Interactive, the developer of Naughty Bear and its sequel, Panic in Paradise. Behaviour has also collaborated on numerous other titles such as Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1766994Wed, 08 Jul 2015 19:44:00 +0100Video: We play through a full level of Mighty No. 9

Donlan and I sat down to play Mighty No. 9 a few weeks ago and had an awful lot of fun with it. Although we were hoping for a game that more closely resembled that initial artwork, it was difficult not to be won over by the gameplay itself.

Sure. We never quite achieved the zenlike flow required to play through a level as it was truly meant to be played, but we really, desperately wanted to. And that's usually a good sign. Join us below to see how we got on and to hear a few first impressions:

This feature-length film is being produced by Legendary Digital Media and Contradiction Films, the companies who previously adapted Mighty No. 9 and Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune's Dead Rising series into the live-action flick Dead Rising: Watchtower. Inafune's company Comcept will also be involved.

Though panned by critics, such as our Dan Whitehead, Dead Rising: Watchtower was still a commercial success on Sony's online streaming service Crackle. As such, Crackle has already greenlit a sequel from Legendary Digital and Contradiction.

Comic horror roguelike The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is coming to Xbox One and the North American Wii U and 3DS eShops on 23rd July, publisher Nicalis, Inc. has announced.

"We are in final submission for both games with Nintendo of Europe," the publisher said on Twitter of its European release on Nintendo platforms. "We'll release as soon as we receive final approval from Nintendo of EU."

"Wouldn't it be nice if I could just say that I'm done and retire?" Keiji Inafune, implausibly 50, lounges on a bench, back against the wall, legs outstretched, crossed at the ankles, arms folded. The translator laughs to mask the sense of unease in the room. But it's not unexpected. Inafune, whose career in Japanese game development began in the late 1980s when he joined Capcom as an illustrator (he helped design the original Street Fighter's iconic characters, Ken and Ryu) has a reputation for bolshiness. After designing Mega Man, a game series that sold tens of millions of copies, Inafune rose Capcom's ranks to become global head of production. It could have been a job for life, but in 2010 Inafune announced on his blog that he was leaving to "start...life over." Freedom of employment (he started his own company, Comcept) seemingly brought with it freedom of speech: during a talk at the 2012 Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, Inafune accused the Japanese video game industry as being in a "tragic state." The verdict made him few friends.

Today, in a plush-carpeted meeting room that smells of old coffee and new plastic, hidden inside Microsoft's stand at the E3 conference in Los Angeles, Inafune's un-Japanese outspokenness has not dulled. "The truth is this," he says. "Had I been born in America, and had I sold 30 million copies of my game Mega Man, I'd be retired by now. But that's not how it works in Japan, is it? Even if I'd have come up with Minecraft I would never have become Notch. That's just how our society works."

Is Inafune's seemingly anti-Japanese rhetoric rooted in resentment? No, he says. "I say these things, not in a spirit of bitterness, but as a positive. It's what has kept me going in this industry. The system is set-up in such a way that I've not been able to retire off a single major success. So, it's a different path we're taken down, just by virtue of being Japanese. It's a good thing. It's allowed me to continue to make video games."

Zen Studios has unveiled an Ant-Man cabinet as the latest add-on for its virtual pinball catalogue that includes Zen Pinball 2, Pinball FX2 and Marvel Pinball.

Based on the upcoming Paul Rudd movie, which is in and of itself based on a comic-book about a shrinking man named Scott Lang, Zen's Ant-Man table lets players reenact the hero's trials and tribulations fighting Yellowjacket in fierce pinball combat. Sure, that may seem silly to us, but a pinball's got to be like that boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark to an ant, so this is serious business for our tiny hero.

Metroid Prime series boss Kensuke Tanabe has explained the decision to focus the upcoming 3DS spin-off Federation Force on characters other than series star Samus Aran.

Tanabe told Eurogamer that he wanted to create a game focused on a co-operative experience - and that having each player control a version of Samus wouldn't make sense.

"[Metroid Prime: Federation Force] is an attempt to expand the Metroid universe," Tanabe told Eurogamer during an interview conducted at E3. "As you can play with up to four players it wouldn't make sense to play as four Samus characters!

The Swindle is out at the end of the month, but you probably haven't seen an awful lot of the game outside of last year's announcement trailer. You might have read Christian's piece back in November, but it'd be nice to see some proper gameplay too, wouldn't it? About 20 minutes, ideally. With accompanying commentary from both the player and the developer. Yeah, that'd be smashing.

Well what would you know, it turns out we have exactly what you're after! Join us in the video below:

Retro platformer Shovel Knight is getting a retail release this October on 3DS, Wii U, PS4, Xbox One and PC. The PC version is Europe only.

North Americans will receive it on 13th October, while the UK and Europe will have to wait until 16th October due to the whole Tuesday/Friday thing that dictates retail releases.

Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games noted its debut effort sold a staggering 700,000 copies. That's over four times Yacht Club's original lifetime estimate of shifting 150K units. Not bad for a small team that raised $311,502 for the game on Kickstarter, even if that team was mostly comprised of former WayForward (Mighty Switch Force, BloodRayne: Betrayal) staff.

Nintendo's inky drip-drip-drip of new content for Splatoon continues, with an all-new mode coming on July 2nd ahead of the first ever Splatfest in Europe, which kicks off this weekend.

Tower Control kicks off this Thursday, introducing an all-new mode where two teams of four contest a central tower in a game of to-and-fro, the tower moving from one side of the map to another as different teams control it. It's the third mode for Splatoon, alongside the Turf Wars which shipped with the game and Splatzones that were introduced soon after.

Splatfest kicks off on Saturday, making a slightly belated debut after some issues with its first appearance in Japan a few weeks back. Over the weekend, maps will be plunged into a nocturnal, neon-lit mode, where players will fight in the name of either pop or rock (in Japan, they fought over the supremacy of udon or soba noodles, naturally).

Pineral has taken pains to point out that "all the environment assets were taken from the Unreal marketplace, all the character actions were scripted using blueprints only, all animations were re-created from scratch".